Yorkshire’s star PM in his pipe and mac
Sir Harold Wilson, a chemist’s son from Huddersfield, was the first ‘image politician’. David Behrens finds evidence in the archive.
HIS FATHER had been an industrial pharmacist in Huddersfield so he knew a bit about chemical reaction, and when Harold Wilson came to power in 1964 it was with a mission to modernise Britain by harnessing what he called the white heat of technology.
But though he courted The Beatles at Downing Street and his Government liberalised the laws on censorship, divorce, abortion and homosexuality, he was at heart a traditionalist, grounded in his Yorkshire roots.
An outstanding student who won a scholarship to his local grammar school and went to Oxford on a county grant, he was considered by his contemporary and biographer, Roy Jenkins, to be the intellectual equal of Peel, Gladstone and Asquith.
But Wilson was also a populist, and after 13 years of Conservative rule, he seized what he saw as a national desire to shake Britain out of its deferential past and embrace the swinging Sixties.
Arguably the first politician to court a TV “image” of himself, he wore a signature Gannex mac, manufactured in the West Riding, and did little to discourage the impersonations of him by Mike Yarwood and others. It was new ground – only Peter Cook had tried it before, when Harold Macmillan was still in office.
But Wilson’s modernisation programme was damaged by Britain’s lack of economic clout and the inevitability of having to devalue the pound – for which he paid the price at the 1970 election.
He was back four years later, though, and while his second term saw reforms in education, health and housing, it was also characterised by economic and industrial unrest.
His sudden resignation in 1976 marked the start of a long decline in his health. He was elevated to the Lords in 1983 but died 12 years later, at 79, suffering from Alzheimer’s.